A solar industry trade group on Thursday released its list of the Top 10 solar integrated utilities of 2008 and it will come as no surprise that California’s Big Three utilities took the top three spots.

What is news, and a sign that solar’s reach is extending beyond the Golden State, is that six of the Top 10 solar utilities on the Solar Electric Power Association’s list hail from places like New York and New Jersey.

Still, San Francisco-based PG&E (PCG), which claimed the No. 1 slot, alone connected 84.9 megawatts of photovoltaic solar to the grid in 2008, accounting for 44% of all new solar capacity last year. Southern California Edison (EIX) came in second with 32.4 megawatts and San Diego Gas & Electric (SRE) took third place with 16 megawatts.

Xcel Energy (XEL) in Colorado was close behind with 14.2 megawatts. After that the numbers take a dive to the single megawatts. Still, utilities from not-so-sunny places like Portland, Ore. made the list.

Southern California Edison is No. 1 when it comes to total installed solar to date — 441.4 megawatts — due largely to the 354 megawatts of electricity generated by nine solar thermal power plants built in the 1980s that continue to operate in the Mojave Desert. PG&E came in second with 229.5 megawatts connected to the grid so far.

Those numbers should skyrocket in the coming years as the California utilities have signed contracts for more than 3 gigawatts of electricity to be produced by large solar farms. Utilities like Arizona Public Service (PNW) — No. 5 on the list for 2008 — are also beginning to contract for solar electricity to be produced by massive megawatt solar power plants.

About Green Wombat

Green Wombat is written by
Todd Woody, a veteran environmental journalist based in California who writes for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Grist and Yale e360. He's one of the few people on the planet who have held a northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.

Todd formerly was a senior editor at Fortune magazine, an assistant managing editor at Business 2.0 magazine and the business editor of the San Jose Mercury News.